Operations Room Hangar

An Operations Room at Hangar

During 4 days, a group of people gathered around an object of study in Hangar, Barcelona to do

Layers

LaaS

SaaS, Software as a Service, is a business model where an organisation develops a software product and makes it available to customers online. The software is hosted in the cloud and the user accesses it remotely for a subscription (monthly, yearly, etc.). The so-called “cloud” is built on deeply extractive, exploitative and exclusionary log(isti)cs. In political-aesthetic terms, it is a regime that prescribes what is feasible and thinkable, flattens and standardizes everyday experience, rigidifies the material conditions of possibility in the sharing of experience with the technological, and imposes logistically mediated conditions of subjectivity and coexistence.

The relational logistics of the category of life (Life as a Service, LaaS) needs to be studied in a broader framework. Despite the necropolitical mandate of the cloud, and against the cloud but from within, what would be the practices and positionalities that could make room for ontological and epistemic disobedience, providing palliative care towards its eventual abolition?

+info: https://hangar.org/en/fellowship/laas-life-as-a-service-de-jara-rocha-primer-fellowship-hangar/

Operations Room

An Operations Room is a situation designed to interrogate the impact of a specific computational infrastructure and its implementations on the operations of a (public) institution, organisation, or collective. Participants with divergent interests, and expertise across scales are invited to study an infrastructure that matters to them and to the (public) institution which deploys it. An Operations Room uses a mix of transdisciplinary methods such as code-inspection, decolonial critical discourse analysis, dependency mapping, creative experiments, and interface analysis. Participants can include engineers, organizers, activists, designers, labourers, accountants, policy people and other users. Together they utilize the prism of "operations" to arrive at an integrated understanding of how a technology manages operations, through what a technology currently does, might do in the future and how it does so. Examples of technologies that could be the subject of an Operations Room: a videoconferencing platform for higher education; a keycard system for managing transactions in refugee camps; a mobile health management tool; a protocol for registering and communicating vaccination status. An Operations Room lasts up to a day and could take place on-line but is ideally physically located in a space relevant to the institution that deploys the technology. Great care is taken in curating the group of participants and mix of methods, preparatory research, selecting tools for documentation, scenography of the room and overall hosting of the situation. An Operations Room can be proposed by an organisation, a concerned individual or follow from a Drop-in Clinic; an outcome of an Operations Room might be a bugreport or a proposal for further participatory research.

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Method description

A method which bring together participants with divergent interests, and expertise across scales are invited to study an operation undergoing digital transformation that matters to them and to the (public) institution which deploys it. An Operations Room uses a mix of transdisciplinary methods such as code-inspection, decolonial critical discourse analysis, dependency mapping, creative experiments, and interface analysis.

Sage

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Room ingredients

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People

• Femke (TITiPI)
• Miriyam (TITiPI)
• Helen (TITiPI)
• Jara (TITiPI, LaaS/Hangar)
• Femke (TITiPI)
• Antonio (Hangar, head of research)
• Anna (Hangar, director)
• Aggeliki (TITiPI)
• Jorge (Hangar, web-development)
• Matteo (Hangar, system-administrator)
• Laila (Hangar, administrator)

Guest: Jaume (external accountant)

Books, pamphlets and references

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Other

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• Grid (Operations Room team)
• Counter Cloud Action posters: Digital Depletion Strike and Cloud Abolition
• Diagram
• "la vida es demasiado corta como para andarse con hojas de cálculo" ("life is too short for spreadsheets", Sage corporate slogan), 17 index cards, TITiPI (2023)